Customer Reviews

Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route

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What "Roots" was to the Boomer Generation, "Lose Your Mother" could and should be to the Generation Next. Saidiay Hartman's writing styles fits perfectly for a generation that longs for and loves narrative, story, and first-hand journal accounts.

However, no one should thus assume that Hartman's writing lacks research credibility for she brilliantly weaves both rousing narrative and copious research to portray a powerful picture of one of history's ugliest stories: Middle Passage. She provides a fresh account of ancient wounds.

Hartman's book can and should make a renewed contribution to the healing of past hurts which still linger deep. Her passionate style and scholarly depth can help a nation move beyond suffering to healing hope.

Reviewer: Bob Kellemen, Ph.D., is the author of Beyond the Suffering: Embracing the Legacy of African American Soul Care and Spiritual Direction , Soul Physicians, and Spiritual Friends.

A deeply moving combination of history, personal memoir and deep reflection,particularly on the heroic and aspirational legacy of slavery as seen by this wonderful writer.

Saidiya Hartman takes us on a journey that is intense, tough and thoroughly rewarding. Impressively, she learned as much about herself as she did about the past she sought, even more.
The beauty of going with her on this journey is that the reader has the same magnificent opportunity, hypnotically led by the author, to ponder and to gain personal insight perhaps too long submerged.

One lesson of this book is that the pain of history doesn't go away easily. It isn't erased through generations of being American rather than African, and it certainly isn't resolved by just going back to Africa. I read this book before my own trip to Ghana, to get a travelogue sense of what to experience, and came away disappointed. The author spends much time standing around the old slave forts feeling lost and sad, searching for a sense of their evil, while all around her life goes on as normal, as life tends to do. She wants to see some signs of what happened there, something like markers, memorials, grave-like images of loss. She wants acknowledgment. She wants people to be weeping there, wailing, to have heads bowed over the horrible crime. Of course they don't, and of course the locals are used to Western people coming there for the sole purpose of feeling their own self-produced overwhelming emotion. There are thousands of crimes committed against humanity in the last several hundred years, and not all sites, despite the overwhelming scale, are treated as hallowed ground.

Her subject matter is hardly dismissible, but her approach is one-pronged. You can't just go back to the scene of the crime when it was hundreds of years ago and half a world away and find answers. It's a worthy trip, just to see the place if nothing else, but it won't solve everything, and it's a bit painful to follow her musings as you can see things won't be resolved. She is aware of, but absolutely cannot come to grips with, the ideas that Africans are different from her now, that there isn't so much of a connection as she wants, and that Africans are aware and accepting of this. For the Africans, an old slave fort is ancient history; they have other problems now and want to deal with regular life.

As for the journey itself, you don't get much of it in this book. There's much valuable background and history present, but the actual travel details and description of life there now is all but lost. The author's approach moves this book firmly out of the category of travelogue and more into a personal examination.

I'm an indigenious Black. Finally the truth is told. The pieces suppled and the puzzle completed.

Lose Your Mother is a story that weaves geneology with African American history. It's intimate and powerful, touching and complex. Universally connecting, it is a story of alienation and hope.

This is a story of rejection of those of us forced into slavery by force and not by choice, by those who ancestors were in colluson with the eurpeans. This is also a realization that what is the most important is the acceptance of being a stanger in a strange stilen land as european america, but also to know that one cannot go back home as what we were, but how we are now. Knowing that wherever we (Africans) are i n the world, one thing is for sure, we are and will always be part on Mother Africa, and the spirit of our Mother will always accept her lost childrens.,

I had to read it for college, and honestly, it was quite redundant. I can summarize it in one sentence:

"They did not accept me when I went to Africa to find my family."

Chapter after chapter go on and on about how lonely she feels in Africa, which seems obvious to me because she has nothing in common with Africans besides her skin color. If I go out and buy a tub of paint and change my skin color, will I have anything in common with her? No. They grew up on different sides of the planet, with totally different governments, economic situations, weather conditions, and culture. What she was searching for was family, and she didn't find it in Africa. Skin color doesn't equate familiarity or a connection.

As Whoopi Goldberg said, I am not African-American. I did not live in Africa, I wasn't born there, I visited there, once, but I am as American as anyone else.

That being said, I'm sure she is a nice lady.